My childhood could only be described as idyllic. A small town in the ‘50s where we could walk to school (three blocks?) or ride our bikes across town to the city park for little league practice. We stayed out until nine p.m. playing hide-and-seek. No mobile phones, social media or video games. Play was something we did outside with other kids.
It was against this background that I read an article in The Atlantic titled What if It’s Not the Phone? “An evolutionary psychologist (Peter Gray) is challenging the popular understanding of kids and technology.” Gray laments “The Decline of Play”
Gray’s academic work defines play as a self-directed activity done only for its own sake. This, he came to believe, enables kids to figure out how to solve their own problems, nurture their own relationships, make their own rules, and manage their own disappointments. But he says that our society has spent the past 70 years or so interfering with that process. We’ve made it harder and harder for kids to do anything: They’re kept indoors for greater portions of the day and given less unstructured time; they play organized sports supervised by adults; they don’t go anywhere alone. Gray grew certain that this loss of independence has been harmful to their mental health.
Looking back, we (kids) took for granted our almost total freedom from adult supervision. It was wonderful.